TROLL 2

Special to PollyStaffle.com

It has become fashionable in recent times to be into the camp value of Troll 2, but I hardly see it as being truly the worst movie of all time. They’re even going to release a film about the making of it called Best Worst Movie soon. I don’t get it. I didn’t think it was that bad a movie. Seriously.

That status would be more suitable for failed “art house” films like My Dinner with Andre or Mindwalk that are conversations turned into films, and are dumb conversations. That book The Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time put Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, which is two hours of amplifier feedback at number 2, and Having Fun with Elvis on Stage, which is just sound bites of Elvis talking to the audience at number 1, but if you put out an album that was Lou Reed sound clips of him talking about why he made Metal Machine Music, that would have easily beat out the Elvis album.

Tedious conversation as a basis for an entire feature films is way worse then anything that a horror film, even a really bad one, could ever create. The real cardinal sin in a horror film is not that the film is stupid; it’s just a horror film, after all, but that the film drags; that there is no horror for long stretches of time, the audience becomes bored and wants their money back. Examples of horror films that suffer from this problem are Attack of the Giant Leeches and the Blind Dead films. They’re pretty abusive to sit through for that reason. Troll 2 doesn’t drag that much.

Troll 2 could be said to have bad acting and a plot that doesn’t really fit together at all. That’s fine by me because the poor acting of a film like Troll 2, and even more so the plot developments that don’t make any sense contribute to the general wrongness of the movie; how twisted the movie really is. Troll 2 is twisted.

The plotline, which doesn’t bring up the word “troll” a single time, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the original Troll film, involves a little boy who talks to his dead grandfather that warns him about goblins. The family takes a vacation to a town called “Nilbog” (goblin spelled backwards), where goblins feed people magical food that turns them into plant-human hybrids that they then consume.

There’s a subplot about the daughter’s boyfriend who spends all his time with his friends (much homoerotic innuendo is made) tagging along with his friends. The acting is the very stiff, poor acting associated with low budget horror or dialogue scenes in pornography.

Those goblins use all kinds of tricks to get those humans to eat that green food and beverage that makes people turn into plants. You never know what kind of shenanigans the Goblins have up their sleeve. The goblins can assume human form and they have a sexy female goblin queen.

There’s a very odd scene of bisexual innuendo when the goblin queen uses an ear of corn to seduce one of the daughter’s boyfriend’s goofy friends. They appear to be performing oral sex on the phallic ear of corn. Odd. Not as odd as the final scene where (this still gets me that it made it into the film) the goblins have turned the boy’s mother into vegetable matter, are eating it, and ask the boy if he wants some. You can see the mother’s naked breasts in this scene.

Freudian and Lacanian film critics can go have a field day with that. I have my little two-fold criticism of post-structuralism that many of these people are into, a marginal far leftist political position that’s sort of stupid, but irrelevant because of how marginal it is, and that you find writers within the field of forensics and investigation doing a lot of what they try to do better, but be that as it may, those kooky Lacanians film critics could have a real field day with Troll 2. The final scene is the revelation of the naked mother’s breast consumed, that’s a whole thesis argument right there. There’s also the scene in the beginning of the film where the boy urinates on food left for the family by the goblins to prevent them from eating it and turning into plant matter. They could go into all that and try to make sense of it all. Without going into all the subtext; it is creepy and perverse. Therefore, it has accomplished its goal as a horror film to be scary. I prefer the aesthetics of campy horror films anyway. Troll 2 is pretty fucked.

You know what else is pretty fucked is Blackula and Blackenstein. Wow are those movies racist! Massively entertaining to watch with a group of people. My Dinner with Andre sucks. Mindwalk sucks even more. They’re not fucked, they just suck. Troll 2 is fucked. There’s a very important distinction between films that are fucked and films that suck. Films that are fucked rule.

- William Wheaton, March 2010

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